Violent ward, p.12
Violent Ward, page 12
‘Ingrid’s all right,’ I said. ‘She’s maybe lost her way.’
‘She could always wind you around her little finger. You were bewitched.’
‘We were young.’
‘Maybe marrying Petrovitch wasn’t smart, not if she wanted the kind of care and attention we both know she demands. Petrovitch is a loner.’
‘Did you tell her that?’
‘No. I was happy for her. They were in love and he was rich and owned half the world.’
‘They seem happy,’ I said.
‘They come from different worlds; they want different things.’ Felicity opened her purse and looked inside it as if she was going to get a cigarette. Maybe she was, but if so she changed her mind and snapped it shut and put it aside. ‘When she started to feel neglected she drained me, Mickey. I helped her all I could, but she took me to the cleaners emotionally.’ Maybe I didn’t look convinced because she went on. ‘One night in LA she came around to see me and said she was frightened. I spent half the night talking to her. Finally she went back home happy and reassured, and slept till noon, and had her maid bring her brunch in bed. Great, except that I grabbed two hours tossing and turning, then went to work bushed. I can’t be a stand-in for her emotional wear and tear. She doesn’t understand what it takes out of me.’
‘Frightened of what?’
‘Frightened of Petrovitch. It’s all nonsense, of course. The truth is she’s become a neurotic woman; she needs counseling.’
‘Maybe she gets lonely.’
‘We all do. It’s okay for you, you’ve got your lovely son.’
‘I haven’t got my lovely son. He’s living with a Gloria Steinem look-alike near Paramount Studios. The last time I went to see him he was brandishing a Browning automatic and telling me how much he could hock it for. I haven’t got my son.’
She continued as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘But what has Ingrid got? Dinner parties and charity committees.’
‘She’s got her husband,’ I suggested tentatively.
‘Oh, boy, isn’t that a man’s answer. A husband! Let me tell you something: her husband takes balance sheets to read in bed. Ingrid told me that for a fact. He takes his accounts to read in bed.’
I didn’t like Petrovitch, but that didn’t seem like a fair comment. ‘The guy is working his butt off to make money so she can take a gold charge card to Rodeo Drive, and you bad-mouth him.’
‘Talk to Ingrid.’
‘I was talking to her this afternoon,’ I said.
‘Did she bend your ear with her problems?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, maybe you’re the one person she should have laid it on. You’re a lawyer. You’re paid to give people advice.’
‘Thanks, Felicity. Can I give you half a dozen of my business cards?’
‘My, my. Did I touch a nerve?’
‘So you’re in special effects? That sounds interesting.’
She grinned. ‘Don’t press your luck, buster! As a matter of fact I’ve been developing a subject for nearly two years. I got a script written, paid for the first draft, and then decided I could get it into better shape myself. I took journalism and English at college, so I know how to write. Special effects? Hell, no, that’s for the birds. I’m going to direct the next one.’
‘Direct? Could you handle that?’
‘Half those jerks get director credits for standing around while the crew makes the movie. I can direct. Yes.’
‘When?’ I wasn’t convinced, and neither was she.
She tugged at the hem of her skirt. ‘Good question, old buddy. When I can get someone excited about my script, that’s when. You know the problem with Hollywood?’
‘I’ve been waiting to hear.’
‘Nepotism. The whole lousy industry is packed with the cousins, brothers-in-law, and children of the guys at the top. Run the credits of any new movie, and you find the greatgrandchildren of the guys who were running the industry back in the thirties.’
‘It’s not so easy,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot of competition, even for people with the right family.’ I have movie clients, plenty of them. Getting from being an outsider with a script under your arm to being a director with a few million bucks to make a picture is a leap that few wannabes made. I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me to twist the arm of someone I knew.
‘And too many kids from film schools. Every last lousy college in the country has got a film school. Usually run by some dumb nerd with a subscription to Variety who learned about movies by doing the Universal Studios tour.’
‘You should see the guys teaching law,’ I said.
‘They know all the shots: “We’ll take the umbrella scene from Hitchcock, the baby carriage sequence from Eisenstein, the sunrise from David Lean, the horsemen from Peckinpah.” The trouble is they haven’t got one original idea in their head; all they know is camera angles.’
‘Can I have another drink?’ I said, getting up to help myself.
‘Too many goddamned car chases,’ she called, waving her empty glass at me.
‘And not enough sex and violence,’ I said, taking the glass and pouring her a refill.
She looked at me for a moment and said, ‘You’re all right, Mickey.’
‘If you say so, Felicity.’
‘You got a football scholarship to college, didn’t you?’
‘When people say that to me in that tone of voice, I know it means: I can believe you’re brainless enough, but do you have the build for it?’ I gave her the drink. ‘That’s right. I was lucky. They needed people on the team that year. The Marine Corps had kicked me out with an injured hand after ten months of service. USC was awarding football scholarships, and as a disabled vet I hit the spot with the board.’
‘You don’t have to apologize. It’s just that you never did look like one of those football dudes.’
‘I was on the team with Budd Byron. He switched from Political Science to Theater.’
‘I see him all the time. We were on a movie together last summer.’
‘Yes, he keeps working.’
‘He’s a fine actor and still gorgeous-looking. I could go for him.’
‘Lucky Budd.’ I sipped my drink and then put it down. I didn’t want it anymore. The mood had changed. When we first came back here I had the feeling that she could hardly wait for us to tumble into bed. But the moment had passed.
Maybe she saw that and wanted to make a preemptive strike. ‘I really must get some shut-eye.’
‘Yep, I must be getting along,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a meeting with Zach Petrovitch in the morning, and I have documents to read.’
I guess we were both putting Band-Aids on our egos. ‘And I have to be on location by six-thirty. There’s a lot of preparation for tomorrow’s shoot, and we’ve got an eight-year-old director who throws tantrums if he’s kept waiting.’
I kissed her decorously, once on each cheek the way the beautiful people who’d been to Europe did it. And then I drove back to ranchero Petrovitch. It was a wonderful night and the mountains gleamed in the moonlight. I didn’t see anyone as I parked the car, but there were several little buzzes as the security cameras turned and focused and checked out who I was and where I went.
It was still only a little past midnight. I didn’t look in on Vic Crichton, in case I got a fusillade of lead. I decided to do half an hour’s work, and while I was tapping away at my laptop I heard cars coming and going. While working I kept thinking of Ingrid, trying to decide if she was really happy or not. I couldn’t tell. Feeding chocolate bars to your husband’s favorite filly sounded like something a shrink could make a saga from. Jealousy? Hatred? Indulgence? I gave up on it and switched to TV. I could only find electronic snow: maybe nighttime TV in Aspen was always that way. I felt tired. I’d fallen into some kind of generation gap, I guess.
I went and opened the window to breathe some of that clear Colorado air. On the mountainside, like strings of amber beads, the lamps of Sno-Cats crawled across the slopes, reupholstering the ski runs for morning. I closed the window tight. You can have too much of that kind of fresh air.
Finally I went to bed and read a book I found on the shelf: Selected Letters of Ernest Hemingway, the author. Oh, boy, and I thought lawyers had problems! After I’d switched off the lights I lay in bed listening to the owls hooting and that wildlife ruckus. Out here in the Colorado mountains all the animals came out after dark; in this respect it was a lot like Los Angeles.
I was awakened by voices. At first I couldn’t hear what they were saying; the sounds were muffled by the deep snow. But I recognized the voices as the folks who live on the hill: Petrovitch and Ingrid. Then I heard Ingrid say, ‘Maybe you get too emotionally involved with them.’ Petrovitch said something about ‘I’m not going to shoot her, and that’s final.’ And then the door closed and silenced the voices.
It was almost dawn; it probably would have been dawn but for all those lousy mountains blocking the light. I guessed they’d been holding hooves all night. Instead of quarreling over kids they quarreled over horses; maybe the nags answered some kind of need for them. Or maybe not. In any case, what business was it of mine? I turned over, thumped the feather pillow, and went back to sleep.
Next morning a phone call from some in-house female secretary told me that Mr and Mrs Petrovitch would both be sleeping late. I could fly home. They’d contact me next week when I was needed. Okay, folks, no offense taken; everything is itemized and on the bill. I gave Vic Crichton a miss. I had breakfast in the morning room, just me, seated, and two servants pouring coffee and orange juice. Before me there was a bowl piled high with watercress and grapefruit salad, two small oatcakes, and muesli with yoghurt. It was delicious and healthy, but I couldn’t help hoping that on the plane they’d serve fried eggs, crispy bacon, and pork sausages.
The man in the woolly hat was wearing his Eddie Bauer fur-collared parka when he took me to the airport via downtown Aspen, where vital errands had to be done. He was a taciturn fellow, and I didn’t ask him whether Aunt Jemima had gone to that big racetrack in the sky. After he’d picked up a package from a laboratory and posted some mail, we crawled through downtown Aspen in heavy traffic until halted by some kind of private cop brandishing a stop sign and a walkie-talkie. ‘Hold it, buddy.’
The mountains shut the light out. The gray snow-packed sky made the street shadowless and drained the world of color, except that small section of it the camera crew saw. For them a searchlight – the gigantic kind of carbon arc lamp that the movie world calls a brute – flooded the street with an oval lake of yellow light and ridged the houses with gold trim. Aspen’s main street, usually a set piece of ordered car parking, was now crammed with vehicles strewn around like forgotten toys at bath time. Not just cars: bulldozers and station wagons, vans and buses, trucks and cranes.
Downtown Aspen was a scene to behold. In a mad reversal of normal life, snow was being trucked down from the mountain and shoveled into the street from the backs of slowly moving dump trucks. They were bringing snow into Aspen! Aspen, which had its every last street swept clean of snow every night: what kind of kooks were these movie folk?
‘No cars – not until we get the shot.’
‘We’ll be through and away in ten seconds,’ I said.
He smiled to reveal broken teeth. ‘This is eighteen eighty-two, mister. No cars, get it? We don’t want the camera to spot the tracks of your deep-tread Michelins, do we?’
The street was crowded with people: some of them were in costume, many of them were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts being dispensed from an open-sided van marked KING KONG LOCATION CATERING. Tracks had been laid along the sidewalk, and on the camera dolly a bearded cameraman in a fur hat was bent over to peer through the eyepiece of the camera. Two powerful grips were flexing their muscles, ready to push the dolly backward along the tracks.
‘Mickey! Mickey, hurry. What luck: you’re just in time!’ It was Felicity. She was wearing a bomber jacket with a fur collar. In her hands she had two steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee. She was smiling and bright-eyed, as though working on the movie energized her.
‘In time for what?’ I opened the car door. It was cold out there.
‘Have coffee and come see what I do for a living.’
‘I’ve got a plane to catch.’
‘They’ll hold the plane.’ She gave me one of the coffees.
‘For me they won’t hold the plane,’ I told her.
‘We have some film that must go to the lab. The LA flight won’t leave until it’s on board.’
‘She’s right. It will be okay,’ my woolly-hatted friend agreed.
‘Movies rule the world,’ I said. But I got out of the car and plodded behind her to a place where a row of folding chairs had been arranged for the technicians. The director was huddled on a high stool. He was dressed in black: black pants, black boots, black windbreaker, black turtleneck, and a black fur hat. He was a big fellow for an eight-year-old.
‘Be quiet. Sit here. Want more coffee? A doughnut?’ She indicated a canvas chair with SPECIAL EFFECTS stenciled on the fabric.
I shook my head. ‘Are you sure about that plane?’
‘Sure, I’m sure. Watch! Watch the actor in the middle, the one with the big Stetson. They’re just about ready to go.’
I’d had dozens of movie clients. Watching movies being made was no big deal. ‘Where’s the focus puller?’ I asked her.
She was up to that. ‘It’s a tracking shot at walking speed. They won’t need to change focus; the distance between the actor and the camera dolly remains the same throughout.’
‘Um,’ I said, and drank my steaming coffee while one of the assistant directors bull-horned everyone into silence. Then the script girl snapped her Polaroid shot and clipped it into the book for continuity.
Felicity leaned across to say, ‘It sure would be great to get it in one shot. It’s a lot of work setting it up. See the other cameras? This is a key shot in the story, and the director wants it covered from a lot of different angles. Mute camera for this one; no need to hold your breath. The airport being so close by makes location recording impossible here.’
‘Let’s go. Camera! Action!’ called the assistant director.
The camera dolly rolled back, keeping always about ten feet away from the three cowboys, who came stomping out of the saloon and through the snow, cursing and waving their arms in anger.
‘Come out, gunman!’ shouted the director. From the same doorway behind them came a man with a rifle. He put it to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. I heard the faint whine of some sort of radio-controlled gadget. Then I was stupefied to see the tall cowboy’s skull explode in a great thick cloud of blood. Pow! Brains, blood, and skull fragments rained down upon the snowy street as the figure crumbled, flailed his arms, and collapsed into gore-encrusted snow.
It was horrific. His head burst open so that imitation blood, gray brains, and torn pieces of Stetson were scattered everywhere. For a moment even these hardened movie people seemed stunned by the sight of the mess, and then the director shouted, ‘Cut! We’ll do it again.’ He was angry as he called to some unseen special effects guy who’d triggered the explosion. ‘Alan, I don’t want to see damage to the Stetson. That wouldn’t happen in reality, would it? Can we fix that?’
Felicity waved a hand in the air, and the director nodded.
A bulldozer roared in to scoop up the bloodstained snow and the bits of skull and brain. As the actor was helped to his feet by a special effects man and a wardrobe girl, I could see the way in which a false head had been fixed to a frame he wore. He was a double: really some six inches shorter than he would seem to be in the film. A girl stood by, holding a new head complete with radio antenna that would be hidden by the Stetson. A second hat, exactly like the previous one right down to the last stain and crease, was also ready.
‘Pretty good, eh?’ said Felicity. ‘I told them to put reinforcing in the Stetson, but that dumb director said it would be okay without.’
‘It’s disgusting,’ I said. I spoke with great feeling.
‘You’ve turned white,’ she said. She chortled. ‘You’re really going to enjoy your airline breakfast.’
‘What kind of mind dreams up a sequence like that?’ It would have served her right if I’d thrown up my grapefruit-and-watercress salad.
‘You’re upset, Mickey. I’m sorry,’ she said, without sounding very sorry. ‘I didn’t know what a sensitive kind of guy you are, or I would have warned you.’
‘All us footballers are like that,’ I said. But I’d heard something in her voice that betrayed her delight. I knew then I had misread the entrails last night. She’d felt rejected by my getting up and going home, and she didn’t like to be rejected.
But she wasn’t going to let me get away so easily. Hanging on my arm, she said, ‘I couldn’t sleep last night. You made me feel guilty … about Ingrid, I mean. I shouldn’t have said she was neurotic. Maybe deep inside I was a tiny bit jealous. I’ll go talk to her and cheer her up and be a little more supportive.’
‘They’re sleeping late. They had a sick horse up there last night,’ I said.
‘She didn’t feed Jemima candy bars again, did she?’ When I didn’t reply. Felicity said, ‘She swore she wouldn’t. I guess things must be bad between them. She does it to punish him, of course.’
‘You’re doing a great job, Felicity,’ I said. ‘See you in LA sometime.’
She let me get into the car before replying. ‘Yeah, sure,’ she said. I heard a very loud maybe.
Once in the car I sat back in the leather and fought down waves of nausea. I opened the window and waved as the car drew away. I needed air. ‘Did you see that stunt?’ I asked the driver.
‘Yeah. Great, wasn’t it?’
‘Maybe Mr Petrovitch would like to come down and watch,’ I suggested. ‘They’re blowing heads off all morning.’
